Baring the Device: Ethics in Publishing

The Gravity of the Thing’s editors have compiled a brief list of resources that relate to ethical practices in publishing. Here are a few ways writers, editors, and publishers are critically analyzing literary craft and publishing processes.

Re(Evolution) | Nathan Tompkins

"you're a fungus expanding your fibrous tendrils across dead skin and decaying organs; sing in the language of hunger, the words an ancestral memory buried in the genetic code..."

Walnut Creek Gas & Co. | Yuna Kang

"Malicious, bleary-eyed scammers, payola and crime and all that. It wasn’t a life I knew, was acquainted with at all. But I liked to dream about it anyway..."

Put Your Lips Together and Blow | Tate A. Geborkoff

"A man stands in front of a mirror wearing last night’s makeup. He knows he should have taken it off, but he didn’t. He was having a good time, living his truest self, and he got home so late (so early)..."

I Give the Angel Chuck’s Watch, and He Recalls the First Night of Creation | Zachariah Claypole White

"We had no language, you understand, / only the possibility of it; / three strands of hibiscus arranged / left to right would mean grandmother; / it could also mean subway or wheelchair."

Getting Personal with Dr. Phil | Nadia Kalman

"Did you ever think you’d end up here / Those times you went on Oprah, talking tough / To teenage moms? You never quite became a star." Nadia Kalman is an NEA Literature grantee and the author of The Cosmopolitans (Livingston Press).

Call to Order | Heikki Huotari

"In the beginning not yet sacred all is apropos. As I traverse a simple closed curve counterclockwise the interior is always on the left. I'll gaze in wonder only at that which I've gazed in wonder at ten times before."